How to Ruin a Good Debt Payoff Story in Seven Easy Steps

debt payoff

One of the core components of being a good financial blogger is having a great debt payoff story. In order to have a great debt payoff story, you first have to acquire a lot of debt. “I was $113 dollars in debt, but now I’m free.” Cool story, bro. Go away, you’re not a real financial blogger. “I was $113,000 dollars in debt and I’ll be free in 2047.” Now that’s an inspirational story! I will take your financial advice and subscribe to your blog.

This is embarrassing for me to talk about but if it can help one person ruin their lives financially only to later become an inspirational figure by overcoming their self-inflicted financial wound then it’s worth it. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my day. Most notably, I tried to always use common sense. This has made many of my life experiences unrelatable to the general population.

Had I only been more eager to live the American dream by purchasing everything on credit and never planning for tomorrow I could be several hundred thousand dollars in debt by now. Ashamedly I actually have a positive net-worth.

All I wanted was to be relatable and inspire others to do the same…but I made these seven mistakes.

Seven Mistakes I Made that Cost Me an Inspirational Debt Payoff Story

While lamenting my lack of a compelling debt payoff story I pondered how it all went so wrong. Only a few years out of college I had zero student loan debt despite making a paltry $10/hour. Fast-forward nearly a decade and many of these same mistakes have repeated themselves leaving my wife and I well on our way to the uninspiring state of financial independence.

I curse the day my life took a turn towards frugality. How many blog subscribers would I have if only I had dug myself an enormous student loan hole and talked about it ad nauseam?! I lay awake at night pondering the debt payoff story I could have had.

Debt Payoff

Take my advice. Learn from my mistakes. Acquire debt. Slowly pay some of it off. Share your story. Be Inspirational.

Mistake Number 1: Community College

The first of many mistakes I made in my journey to financial solvency was to attend community college. Community college is a fraction of standard university tuition. One of the most basic ways for young people to secure an impressive amount of debt and I blew it. As an added bonus, I was able to live at my parent’s house. This saved me not only thousands of dollars in tuition but thousands in room and board.

Disgustingly uninspiring.

You only get a precious few years of college and, instead of wracking up a huge student loan bill in order to amaze future readers, I entered my junior year with only a few thousand dollars of debt. What a compelling story I was crafting for myself. Sadly, it didn’t stop there.

Mistake Number Two: I Lived in My Truck

The second mistake I made on my journey was trying my best to limit the cost of college during my junior and senior years.

I found a loophole in the college rulebook that allowed me to avoid paying for the extravagant meal plan so long as I wasn’t living in the dorms. Since I didn’t have money to rent an apartment, and I didn’t want to pay for the dorms and meal plan, I foolishly bought a topper for $450 and lived in my truck.

This saved me thousands of dollars in the fall semester of my junior year. Seeing how artificially happy I was living in my truck, the faculty started worrying I would convince other students to copy my frugality. A parking lot full of hippy vagrants apparently wasn’t part of the University’s long-term financial plan.

I was called into the administrator’s office where I was offered free room and board for the remainder of the year so long as I stopped proclaiming the gospel of extreme frugality to the other students.

“But what’s in it for me?” I asked.

Mistake Number Three: I Didn’t Buy Textbooks

Not to immediately correct myself, but I did buy some textbooks. I just didn’t buy ALL the textbooks I needed. I planned on purchasing all the required textbooks, but, number one, it’s hard to fit very many textbooks in the back of a truck and space was limited. Number two, they were very expensive.

Sometimes I would use the library textbooks for free. Sometimes I would borrow a friend’s textbook for free. If those options failed I would just see if I could pass the class without using a textbook.

If all three of those options failed, then and only then did I get around to purchasing a textbook. I would buy used if at all possible on the rare occasions that I had to purchase my own copy of a textbook. I feel like I’ve said textbook too many times recently.

This saved me a few thousand dollars over the course of my education. To be fair, I probably didn’t retain as much information as I would have had I actually purchased and read the books that taught said material. Hard to know for sure.

Mistake Number Four: I Graduated in Four Years

It wasn’t until watching Van Wilder several years later that I realized staying in college longer than four years was an option. I hopped in and out of college in a single Olympic cycle. It took one Presidential term for me to go from college freshman to college graduate.

Some of my friends switched majors or dilly-dallied with a sufficient resolution to stay in college for several additional years.

If there was a single mistake that I kick myself the most for, this is it. Knowledge is power and I had no idea I didn’t have to just graduate after four years. High School takes four years, I thought college was supposed to take four years as well.

Adding just a single year to the college experience can raise your overall student loan debt by 20%.

I could have acquired so much debt had I simply refused to graduate on time. But, like a fool, I stuck with a single major which allowed me to, more or less, seamlessly navigate the requirements for graduation.

Mistake Number Five: I Graduated with a Degree that People Care About

Talk about a rookie move. One of the best ways you can be sure it will take years and years to pay off your student loan debt is to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for a degree nobody cares about.

Like an idiot, I got a standard business degree. There were degrees that sounded more fun but I kept thinking about future job prospects. If only somebody had mentioned the Buddhist concept of YOLO to me. I could have had more fun in college AND had a better student loan debt payoff story.

Once I graduated, I had the skills and resumé to immediately contribute to a company.

Through dumb luck, I graduated in 2009 so jobs were hard to come by. My first job out of college was selling shoes part-time for $10/hour. Every part-time sales associate on our team had a college degree. I got lucky to have such a low-paying job to start my working career, as that makes my debt payoff story at least slightly less uninspiring.

You won’t be guaranteed to graduate during a recession so take my advice and get a degree that no employer can benefit from. This will make your debt pay-off story all the more inspiring twenty-five years from now when you finally get the type of job where you earn enough to make additional student loan payments.

Mistake Number Six: I Didn’t Buy a Bunch of Neat Things on Credit

This next one almost makes me want to throw-up. Pretty much throughout my whole life, I thought you had to actually have money in your account before you bought something.

There I was walking around in old jeans and semi-worn shoes while those around me bought tangible accessories that made them better people.

Do you know how high my credit card limit was when I was in college? Me either! Sadly, I never approached it. If I didn’t have money in my checking account to buy something, I just didn’t buy it.

When I found out that current me could have an experience that future me would have to foot the bill for, I was aghast at my stupidity. I almost always opted for current me to get the short end of the stick so that future me could benefit. Just had my poles reversed is all.

Mistake Number Seven: I Worked Through College

In retrospect, this was a moronic decision on my part. Instead of living it up throughout my college experience, I stayed gainfully employed throughout, balancing my social life with school and work responsibilities.

This unfortunate, yet clever, life-hack allowed me to pay off much of my student loan debt while I was incurring it. I’m embarrassed to say I went so far as to work the night shift at a gas station in order to provide future me with an easier post-college transition. As we all know, an easier life does not equate to a more inspirational story.

Avoid these Seven Mistakes and Create the Debt Payoff Story You Deserve

People like watching people overcome struggle. Not fake struggle, real struggle. Real struggle that you manufacture yourself through your choices. I never had real struggle. Struggling to stay awake during Economics because you worked the 11p-7am shift and then took a catnap in your truck doesn’t count.

Real struggle is partying throughout your college career at a fine and expensive university, loading up various credit cards with neat consumables to impress your fellow acquaintances, switching majors a few times, graduating with a degree in post-modern aquatic basket-weaving and then struggling to find a respectable career because The Man is keeping you down. THAT is struggle. What I went through was just mild inconvenience.

Sadly, my mistakes continued to mount even after college. To this day I’ve never owned a new vehicle or even had a car payment. We’ve always lived somewhere well below what we could afford so that we could stockpile the rest.

For years we’ve lived like broke college students so that if the day ever came where the wheels fell off and we both lost our incomes we’d have enough saved that we wouldn’t be forced to live like broke college students. Idiots. Uninspiring idiots.

There were so many times in my life I could have chosen to do things differently. Had I been smarter about making more financial mistakes I could have been an inspirational character in twenty or so years. It wasn’t meant to be.

I’ll leave you with this quote from a real-life blogger,

“Who is more inspiring? The man who loses 100 pounds or the man who never gains 100 pounds? Gain the weight. Acquaire the debt. Inspire.”- Mr. Burrito Bowl

Please, learn from my mistakes.

If you enjoyed this article please share it.

Without a compelling debt payoff story, there’s no reason to listen to my advice, but I hope you enjoyed the jokes.

Here are a few more articles you might like since you’re here.

It’s Only Heavy if You Pick it Up

Debt, Compounding Interest, and $50,000 Truck

How to Recharge Your Life Battery Through Stoicism

Author: MrBurritoBowl

Mr. Burrito Bowl is a 34-year-old man from Whitefish, Montana who likes to draw stick figures and say things that sometimes relate to finances, but not always.

5 thoughts on “How to Ruin a Good Debt Payoff Story in Seven Easy Steps”

  1. This was a good chuckle. While there may be legit reasons to not have you live in a truck around campus, yes, I suspect a lot of it had to do with they didn’t like you bucking the system.

  2. I feel you, I have never in my life had a single debt except a small house mortgage paid off early. I got a chemical engineering degree and that alone made me one of the highest paid graduates of my state university that semester even though I accepted an offer in a very LCOL area, one of 8 job offers I had. I married a frugal spouse and we’ve stayed married 42 years. Our smart kids all got totally free, and useful four year degrees. We are worth millions in retirement but still drive old cars with lots of miles. So boring and so not inspirational. What could we possibly know about money? We are like much older versions of you boring people.

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